5 Wood Stove Dangers That Can Put You in the Hospital. Number 3 Fills the Room While You Sleep.

The stove is the one appliance in the house that nobody inspects. No manual, no service call, no gauge, no light. It sits there being useful for thirty years and the whole time it is the hottest object inside your walls. I'm Harlan Sawyer. Forty-two years in the timber, 1969 to 2011, and forty-five winters heating this house with wood. I am not a fire marshal and I have never sold a stove or a detector to anybody. I have made most of these mistakes myself and I say which ones. The five: the glass, which reads cool and runs at 400 and takes a child's palm in under a second - the door gasket you have never touched, and the dollar bill test that finds it in four minutes - carbon monoxide, which has no colour and no smell and does not wake you, and the three ways it gets in - the cracked firebrick and the sagging baffle, which both fail quietly where you never look - and the wall behind the stove, which has been cooking since the day you moved in, and why a house can burn in year eighteen with nothing having changed. Plus the three mornings in the winter of 1991 when Ruth had a headache and I told her it was the weather. Tell me your state, the year of your stove, and go read the expiration date on the back of your carbon monoxide detector and put that number in the comments too. Stack it dry, friend. It keeps. Notes: CDC recommends a carbon monoxide alarm on every level and near sleeping areas, not in the stove room. Detectors expire; the date is printed on the back. Standard clearance to combustibles is 36 inches unless the tag on your stove lists a smaller figure, in which case the tag governs. A heat shield needs an air gap, open top and bottom; metal screwed flat to the wall is not a shield. Pyrolysis is the recognised reason repeatedly heated framing ignites below its normal temperature. I'm not a fire marshal or a doctor. Headaches that clear when you leave the house are a doctor and a detector today. #woodstove #woodheat #carbonmonoxide #firesafety #homestead #oldways